ENA Dialtone Connect & ENA Connect

Posted by Kylie Watkins on Thursday, September 20, 2007

A Feature-Rich, Cost-Effective & Education-Centric Answer to your Telecommunication Needs

With 28 site deployments as of end of August 2007, ENA's rollout of its Connect and Dialtone Connect VoIP solutions (Voice over Internet Protocol, the routing of telephones over the Internet) is well underway.

"The feedback from customers has been exceptionally positive," reports Michael McKerley, ENA's director of research and development. Having focused for the last 18 months on bringing the company's VoIP initiative from concept to implementation, McKerley is gratified to hear that customers appreciate the features and functionalities as much as he does.

But McKerley is quick to point out that the features are but one of the many significant benefits to ENA's VoIP product suites. Some of the other important benefits are:

• Customers have complete administrative control of the robust functionality making moves, adds and changes a breeze
• The solutions vastly enhance external caller capacity
• They offer greater security because a phone in every classroom becomes affordable
• They provide customers a built-in disaster continuance model
• They represent a tremendous value over traditional telephone services
• The solutions are hosted, combinable and pay-per-extension, offering a low total cost of ownership and an easy migration path to future upgrades

ENA customers in Maury County, TN, agree.

ENA's VoIP Solutions Are "Feature-rich"
"The services we offer are truly feature-rich," says McKerley. They're as fully feature-rich as any PBX system you can buy. ENA's VoIP solution is carrier-class and completely comparable to any other brand-name solution on the market, such as Cisco or Nortel.

ENA's new VoIP solutions are offered in two telecommunications suites that provide four convenient ways to receive state-of-the-art, next-generation phone service. ENA Dialtone Connect cost-effectively replaces existing PRI or analog phone lines and extends the life of customers' existing PBX equipment (private branch exchange, a private telephone network used within a school or library), while bundling enhanced features and unlimited long distance at no extra cost. ENA Connect Basic, Plus and Pro gives customers the robust features of a new PBX, but doesn't require them to purchase, manage, maintain or continually upgrade any premise-based PBX equipment. With ENA's hosted PBX you get all of the robust features and none of the maintenance headaches or cost barriers. ENA Connect bundles dial tone along with the most advanced, user-friendly, timesaving functionality and call plans available today.

The contrast between Suzanne Ingram's district's previous telephone system and her new ENA Connect Plus and Pro system is enormous. The Maury County School District instructional technology supervisor recalls how a simple phone call was once a potential ordeal. "If I needed to speak to someone in our school system, I'd have to call the front desk and ask them to connect me. Then there was the chance that I'd be disconnected while I waited. Finally, if the person wasn't there, since we had no voicemail, I had to rely on the administrative assistant to write an accurate note. Today I can look the person up on the computer and call them with a click of a button. Maybe the person knew they wouldn't be in today. Using the same browser-based interface, they can have their calls forwarded to another phone number. Maybe the person has set their hunt group feature in such a way that my call, if it isn't answered, will ring all of that person's available phone numbers until I get them. If I do leave a voice message with someone, that person can transfer the message to any inbox in the system."

For a parent making that same call to Maury County School, all he or she may have received was a busy signal. Even with the best PBX-based phone system in the world, a school's external telecommunications-with another school in the district or with anyone in the outside world-is at the mercy of the finite number of traditional copper telecommunication lines leading into and out of the school. If a school has three such lines, a single parent call requires 33% of the school's entire external call-load capacity. On the other hand, a typical ENA-connected school will traffic telecommunications between buildings through its Internet LAN and out to the world via the Internet-potentially accommodating over 1,000 calls simultaneously using a 100-Mbps Internet egress link. That's a tremendous increase in external caller capacity or as McKerley says: "That's plenty of pipe for a whole lot of phone calls."

Tommy Schyler, Maury County's network administrator, is often in the field all day and away from his phone. His favorite feature is the ability to retrieve his messages at home on the computer. "I can also have my voicemail sent to me via e-mail. Everything is Web-based, and that's a big, big plus if someone really needs to reach me."

"And remember," says McKerley, "customers can mix and match our services and all of this functionality can be tailored for users by authorized administrators. For example, we can give users the ability to intercom person to person, straight to the speaker or make drag-and-drop conference calls from their desktop with our interface. It's easy to enable effective and productive communications by customizing features to meet the needs of each user."

"Infinitely Scalable"
"Our solutions are infinitely scalable," explains McKerley. "You can start as large or as small as you want. And even better, you never have to buy or implement another phone system again."

As an illustration, McKerley describes a hypothetical school that needs 50 phone extensions today but knows that need will grow to 250 in the future. Traditionally, the school had two choices. Buy a telecommunications solution that only scales to 50 extensions today and later, when you grow, buy another one for 250. Or you can buy a telecommunications solution now for 250 extensions and pay for more than you're using. "You're essentially stuck between building your phone system twice or paying for something you don't need," concludes McKerley. "We're pay-per-extension. Need five phones now? Great, done. Thirty more in a few months? No problem, done."

An Easy, Cost-effective Entree Into IP-based Telecommunications
In another example, this one an actual potential customer interested in ENA Connect, a school district is currently spending about $590 a month for telecommunications after E-Rate. "For that, they have no higher-end features. It's just basic phone service like your old phone at home," says McKerley. With ENA's solution, the customer would get a feature set as robust as any on the market, flexibility, no outlay of capital expenditure for the PBX, plus service, maintenance and upgrades. "For $120 more a month, they'd essentially have a brand-new, top-of-the-line IPbased PBX system-which would otherwise cost forty to fifty thousand dollars. The customer's only capital expense cost would be the phones, and our new phones are only slightly more than they'd spend on a refurbished model like theirs on E-Bay."

Taking it a step further, if the user has a computer, he or she doesn't need to have an actual phone. With ENA Connect, a user can use a "soft phone" on the computer desktop. A soft phone is a software application that enables a computer to function as a telephone via Voice over IP technology, using the lines of the computer network as the medium for transmitting telephone service. "That's a very inexpensive phone and allows for videoconferencing that costs next to nothing," says McKerley. "Because ENA's solution is hosted as opposed to being a piece of equipment, we open up numerous possibilities and eliminate many constraints."

"Although Dialtone Connect is in many ways a much scaled-down version of Connect, it represents a tremendous value and increased functionality to schools that aren't yet ready to get rid of their current PBX solution," continues McKerley. "For a flat rate, you get everything that normally drives up fees on traditional telco costs: caller ID, call waiting, last-call return, hunt groups. And you get unlimited long distance, in most cases, on top of all that. The only thing you pay extra for are international and 411 calls."

"Have you ever seen a traditional telco bill to a school system?" McKerley asks. "It's literally voluminous, 50 to 100 pages for a small district. Some telcos will even provide you with a software CD so that you can analyze your bill. Our bill is one page. That alone is a time-saver and why we say ENA's VoIP service is Powerful, Simple, Smart."

This kind of value and scalability is what most impresses Kenny Morrow, Maury County Schools technology specialist and assistant network administrator, with ENA's solution. "We have a small IT staff. In terms of installation, monitoring and upgrades, the heavy lifting is done by ENA. And the pricing is great. The flat rate per phone is cheaper than purchasing a new system, the phones, all the boxes, PRI (Primary-Rate Interface, the ISDN transmission lines) and the long distance minutes. Whatever the additional cost of having phones in the classroom, that's more than offset by the value. I advocate this solution because it's an easy way to get into IP-based telecommunications."

A Built-in Disaster Continuance Model
ENA's VoIP offerings solve another major issue for schools: safety and security. Today's schools must be ever-vigilant for criminal intrusion, terrorism and other threats. A phone in every classroom clearly bolsters safety and security. "Old schools such as some of the ones we have in our district are a particular concern," says Ingram. "There are many doors, outbuildings, et cetera, that make surveillance, detection and lockdown extremely difficult."

Furthermore, ENA's solutions represent what McKerley calls "a built-in disaster continuance model." As a hosted PBX system, ENA's VoIP solutions are redundant top to bottom: there is generator power backup, fully redundant servers, fully redundant connections back to the telephone world or PSN (Packet-Switched Network) and a fully redundant Internet connection. With an ENA solution, a school's telecommunications system becomes much more outage-proof. What's more, if a disaster or emergency renders a school shut down, the principal remains reachable. "Unlike a traditional telephone service, where telephone numbers are tied to the actual, physical circuits of a specific building, you can pick up our phone numbers and move them anywhere," says McKerley. "If a tornado knocks out a school, and everyone in town is trying to reach the principal, our principal can be at home or at another office talking on a soft phone. Once your telephone number is designated, you can take the phone to Hawaii and it will ring."

Yet, of critical importance to safety and security, "our intelligent 911 system can ascertain if a phone has moved to another ENA location," explains Simon Weller, ENA product architect. "Anytime someone calls 911, we look at the IP address and are able to seamlessly route the call to the correct Public Safety Answering Point, with the correct physical address information, no matter which school the caller happens to be in." ENA VoIP service provides the maximum in flexibility, security and safety.

Six months ago Tommy Schyler came to Maury County Schools' educational technology department after serving twelve years as network technician with an automobile manufacturing company. While he was there, he helped set up that company's VoIP system. Comparing the two, Schyler's verdict: "ENA's is a long way ahead of that one."